The sirventes was composed between 16 March 1270, when Louis IX set out for Africa (leaving Aigues-Mortes on 1 July), and 25 August, the date of his death (Levy, pp. 10-11). Levy (p. 90) identifies the King of Navarre (46) as Thibaut II (1253-1270), the Count of Toulouse (51) as Louis’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers (1249-1271), and the English king as Henry III (1216-1272). He follows Diez’s view that the praise of the latter must be ironic, since although Henry had been contemplating a crusade since 1253 he was now too old and frail for this (Friedrich Christian Diez, Leben und Werke der Trobadors, Leipzig 1829, p. 498 [sic]). However, this is to ignore the crusading activities of his son the Lord Edward, whose crusading commitment is not in doubt. Edward took the cross in Northampton in June 1268, along with his brother Edmund whom the pope had already selected as his father’s substitute (Frederick Maurice Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward, 2 voll., Oxford 1947, p. 562), and during a visit to Louis in August 1269 agreed to be at Aigues-Mortes by 15 August 1270. In the event there were delays in completing the practical arrangements. Edward left England on 20 August, reached Aigues-Mortes by 28 September, and Carthage on 10 November in time to join the withdrawal of the crusading army to Sicily, where he stayed on, determined to fulfil his crusading vow, sailing to Cyprus in the spring of 1271 and arriving in Acre on 9 May (Peter Lock, The Routledge Companion to the Crusades, Abingdon 2006, p. 184; Simon Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade, 1216-1307, Cambridge 1988, p. 115 and the whole chapter devoted to Edward’s crusade, pp. 113-153; Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 voll., Harmondsworth 1971, first published Cambridge 1951-1954, vol. III, p. 335). Rather than Zorzi’s references to the English king being ironic, it seems more likely that he is not very well informed, that the relevant leader is in fact Edward, and that Zorzi’s idea that he was to be accompanied by an unsurpassably powerful army is based on poetic licence, misinformation and/or wishful thinking, since English recruitment to his crusading army was poor. – A Venetian merchant, Zorzi was one of the several Ghibelline troubadours hostile to Charles of Anjou, composing a planh for the young Conradin whom Charles put to death after the battle of Tagliacozzo on 23 August 1268 (see the notes my edition of BdT 107.1, on Rialto). He was imprisoned from 1266 to 1273 during a war between Venice and Genoa, and it was therefore in Genoa, where he was a prisoner, that he composed this sirventes (see Hermann Suchier, Giornale storico di letteratura italiana, 2, 1884, pp. 425-427). Louis has set out from the north of France (see the note to v. 10) in other words his forces are heading south, but with no indication that they have yet embarked on the sea crossing. Lines 19 and 57 show Zorzi anticipating the English King’s arrival from across the Channel to join Louis «here on the Continent». The sirventes most probably celebrates the start of the crusade, with the combined French forces heading for the Mediterranean and the English expected to follow up behind. This would place it between 16 March and the end of June 1270, though as a prisoner in Genoa Zorzi was probably not privy to details of Louis’ exact timing and whereabouts.